The Pleiades star cluster is climbing higher into the pre-dawn sky each day. Tomorrow, it’s well up in the east at first light, not far to the left or upper left of a thick crescent Moon. In western skylore, the Pleiades represent seven sisters — the daughters of Atlas. To Chinese skywatchers, though, they represented Mao — a spear or a fuzzy head of hair. The earliest confirmed reference to Mao comes from a box found in the well-preserved burial place of Zeng Hou Yi. He was a governor who lived more than 2400 years ago, when seven feudal kingdoms were fighting for supremacy. The box is decorated with an astronomical map that shows the Pleiades with a Chinese character for spear, known as Mao. When a historian wrote a famous book two centuries later, though, he used another character for Mao. It has almost the same pronunciation, but it means “hairy head.” Some speculate that’s because the historian thought the Pleiades looked like the fuzzy fringe of a spearhead. Whether spear or fuzz
